This essay begins where Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" begins: facing a moral world in ruin. MacIntyre argues that this predicament leaves us with a choice: we can follow the path of Friedrich Nietzsche, accepting this moral destruction and attempting to create lives in a rootless, uncertain world, or the path of Aristotle, working to reclaim…

This article is an autoethnodrama, which originally began as a workshop piece coming to fruition as an enacted staged reading at the University of Illinois during Fall 2011. As an ethnodrama, the article explores the author's educational journey, pivoting around one of his fondest childhood memories reciting a Langston Hughes poem. Interwoven…

Stories and storytelling have been used for millennia to entertain, challenge and educate. As a shared form of language interaction, storytelling has engaged communities in developing and perpetuating common understandings of both language and culture, as critical foundations to harmonious societies. Stories and storytelling provide a rich source…

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and…

Although evaluation is at the core of many of the practices associated with poetry--including teaching, editing, selecting, judging, and even writing--and although there have been involved discussions of the assessment of verse, there has been no empirical investigation of the specific values which, one supposes, lie at the heart of such…

The biblical story of the shibboleth is widely cited in language testing as emblematic of the social and political function of language tests. But the meaning of the shibboleth has also been explored within poststructuralism, specifically within Derrida's discussion of the dilemmas of identity in the work of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan.…

Using a case study design, this study investigated the literacy identity, both collectively and individually, of the members of "Slammin!", a slam poetry team from an urban high school. Participant observation of practices and performances was used to find how the involvement in this group uniquely impacted students' academic and personal lives.…

This paper reflects on a visit by Christian poet John Terpstra to the final class session (on a Maundy Thursday) of my Literature and Environment course, to read his poetry suite on making a cross for his church out of a fruit-tree in an orchard being ploughed under for construction. Terpstra plays on the Stations of the Cross by interweaving the…

In this article a comparison is drawn between the way in which the pragmatist philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey addressed religious issues and his view on Religious Education in his poetic narratives and in his scholarly writings, especially in his "magnus opus" on religion, "A Common Faith". Do we gain deeper insight into Dewey's view on…

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

At the beginning of the twentieth century a new subgenre of poetry written in Spanish, but rooted in Japanese literary tradition, began to emerge in the works of Spain's vanguard and Generation of 1927 poets and among young modernist poets in Mexico and South America. Transmitted first through France and later directly from Japan, the popularity…

Being in the education community for long years, Tevfik Fikret aims to educate children and teenagers with the works he has written while he is carrying out his profession. Knowing child's world very well, the poet gives messages which can be counted valid in today's education perception. Emphasizing the basic humanistic and moral values such as…

In Antonio Machado's collection "Soledades", the poet's search for identity guides an introspective quest where context, body, and mind form an intricate and inseparable connection. By extending cognitive capabilities to his natural environment, the poet, through embodied cognition and Theory of Mind, reads other people's and nature's minds to…